Understanding AlwaysOn Architecture is extremely important when building a solution with failover clusters and availability groups. Microsoft has just released two very important white papers related to this subject. Both the white papers are written by top experts in industry and have been reviewed by excellent panel of experts. Every time I talk with various organizations who are adopting the SQL Server 2012 they are always excited with the concept of the new feature AlwaysOn. One of the requests I often here is the related to detailed documentations which can help enterprises to build a robust high availability and disaster recovery solution. I believe following two white paper now satisfies the request.

SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provides a unified high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) solution. This paper details the key topology requirements of this specific design pattern on important concepts like quorum configuration considerations, steps required to build the environment, and a workflow that shows how to handle a disaster recovery.

If you are not going to implement AlwaysOn feature, this two Whitepapers are still a great reference material to review as it will give you complete idea regarding what it takes to implement AlwaysOn architecture and what kind of efforts needed. One should at least bookmark above two white papers for future reference.

Pinal Dave is a technology enthusiast and an independent consultant. He has authored 11 SQL Server database books, 21 Pluralsight courses and have written over 3800 articles on the database technology on his blog at a http://blog.sqlauthority.com. Along with 14+ years of hands on experience he holds a Masters of Science degree and a number of database certifications. For any SQL Server Performance Tuning Issue send email at pinal @ sqlauthority.com .

Nupur Dave is a social media enthusiast and and an independent consultant.